Now You Can Edit Google Docs by Speaking

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Now You Can Edit Google Docs by Speaking

WIRED

Your fingers can take the rest of the day off, because Google just rolled out the ability to edit with your voice in Google Docs. It's more than just a straight dictation feature, which was introduced to Google Docs late last year. Now, you can correct and stylize written text with voice commands as well.1

The cool new feature only works in the desktop version of Chrome, and only with Google Docs — no spreadsheets or other file types. But it’s still a useful addition for hands-free writing.

Granted, editing text by voice takes a bit of practice and requires learning a few keywords. For example, you say “select (word)” to choose text and "delete" to, well, delete text. Other commands let you apply headers and other formatting elements. You won't find these new features in the Google Docs mobile app, where you can already do speech-to-text through your phone.

Hey—look! A brief video of the new voice-typing features:

To enable voice typing and editing, launch or open a Google doc. Click Tools on the nav bar, select “voice typing,” and click the large microphone icon that pops up. Then start gabbing.

In my tests, the feature lived up to the excellent precedent of Google’s voice features in Google Now and Android TV. It isn't perfect, but it hit success rate of about 90 percent if I spoke clearly and added punctuation via voice commands. The voice-typing feature is also smart enough to have a measure of context awareness. It recognized the difference between saying “delete” as part of a sentence and making an edit command. It was the same story with phrases such as “insert a bullet list.”

It responds fairly quickly, too. I tried to trick it by talking like an auctioneer who'd had one too many espresso shots, and although the tool lagged behind by a word or two, it never got lost.

I couldn't test this because of a hardware problem, but you might be able to use Google Docs to transcribe audio files if your computer has an audio-in and audio-out port and you have a 3.5mm male-to-male headphone cord. Fire up a voice recording on your machine or device, use the headphone cord to connect your audio source to your computer's audio-in port, and let Google do the rest.

Unfortunately, newer Macs (except the pricey Mac Pro) lack 3.5mm line-in ports because Apple, and it has been a few years since Apple let you select the headphone port as an audio-in pathway because Apple. But if you’ve got a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac from 2012 or earlier, having Google Docs transcribe your voice recordings is worth a shot. Otherwise, you’ll need to use one of these USB adapters or an older Mac for it to work with OS X. Many Windows machines still have both audio-in and -out ports because Windows.

If you want proof of how well Google Docs voice dictation works, well, click here—it's a voice dictated version of the story you just read. It makes almost as much sense!

1UPDATE 03:05 PM ET 03/02/16: This story and its headline have been updated to correct details about the new Google Docs features. The voice-typing feature in Google Docs launched late last year, but the voice-editing feature is new. The voice command for selecting text was also changed to correct an error in the original article.